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Not just another IT investment, Business Intelligence (BI) has certainly come a long way in India. Facing increased competition and globalization threat, many enterprises have taken up BI in their bid to thwart competition and pave way for revenue and profitability. The Indian BI market is seeing investments ranging from deploying pure reporting and analytics tool to business performance management tool, balance scorecard, and KPI tools. IDC India predicts that the Indian Business Intelligence market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 35.9%.

Core Capabilities
Over a period of time, organizations have built huge information within their enterprises, and this information is scattered across various departments and systems. Says Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni Travels, "And, therein lies the real challenge of converting this data into information and making use of it for the benefit of business; and this information can prove to be a great organizational asset, if leveraged rightly." In short, BI is the use of an organizations disparate data to provide meaningful information and analysis to employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for more effective decision-making.

"Business Intelligence is a process of transforming this information into intelligence that can fuel innovation and help organizations succeed in todays competitive environment. Right deployment of BI solutions can not only help organizations understand events, but also provide predictive analysis and help them in gaining critical foresight capabilities; a great differentiating factor in todays environment," elaborates Sudipta Sen, CEO and MD, SAS Institute India.

The core capabilities of BI include grouping information together, measuring it, giving end users access to it and, most importantly, sharing information changes. "These capabilities can be further broken down into three main components: enterprise performance management (EPM), information discovery and delivery (IDD), and enterprise information management (EIM)," says Sanjay Deshmukh, country manager, Business Objects.

Huge Benefits
With Indian enterprises going through a phase of tremendous growth, growing either organically or expanding their customer base through mergers and acquisitions, "it is in this highly competitive market that organizations need to address business challenges on managing growth, managing profitability, providing customer service, and adhering to regulatory compliance," says Sen.

No longer ruled by the IT department, BI has become a tool that delivers competitive advantage through data analysis. And, with an increasing number of business users involved in the decision-making process and pushing the IT department for faster and more focused implementations, BI has emerged from its cocoon into mainstream usage. "The biggest advantage of Business Intelligence solutions is that they provides insights into business, so that users at any level can make smarter and more informed decisions," says Pallavi Kathuria, director, Server and Tools Business Group, Microsoft India.

BI provides users with better insights, particularly from operational data stored in transactional systems. "The bread and butter business applications and systems are more focused on transactional aspects, however, decision-makers need critical insight into the companys performance and the reaction of the market to their new productsand these kinds of questions cant be answered simply by looking at transactional records," reasons Soumendra Mohanty, lead, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing practice, Accenture India.

BI and its enabler technology data warehousing provide a platform to the enterprise so that they can analyze past data from a historical context and improve decision-making abilities.

BI in India
Even though BI has been around for nearly two decades, it was only recently that Business Intelligence caught the fancy of Indian organizations, which want to derive value out of their accumulated data as a result of automating their business process through applications like ERP and CRM.

According to Gartners forecast, the BI platform software market in India is expected to reach $50.8 mn by 2011. BFSI and telecom are the key drivers in India while retail is the global driver for BI adoption. Investments made by telecom companies are comparatively higher than those made by banking sector for BI applications. "BI priorities in India vary both by the vertical and size of the enterprise," says Bhavish Sood, principal analyst, Gartner India. "Dashboards and score cards are the common requirements for a range of industries while telecom and banking verticals are moving toward implementing sophisticated analysis for understanding customer churn and making credit risk assessments," he says.

The use of BI is directly related to technological maturity of an organization, and globally, most of the industries that have pioneered the trends have also taken the lead in India as well. "Therefore, most BI users in India are those in the BFSI sector while telecom and retail companies too are not to be left behind," says Rajesh Ramaswamy, head of BI practice, Marlabs.

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